Highlights from BYU colleges

Ira A. Fulton College of Engineering and Technology

• Students in the Ira A. Fulton College will have the opportunity to be mentored by successful professionals as part of the college’s Advancement Council for Engineering and Technology conference Nov. 9-10. These professionals are friends and alumni of the college with a wide variety of professional and leadership experience. Many have served as CEOs, vice presidents or founders of their companies. Professionals in attendance at this conference include Mary Peery, former senior vice president of Hewlett Packard; Phil Carmack, VP/GM of Emerging Products at Google; and Marc Foulkrod, CEO of Avjet Global Sales.
• Senior-level students and their spouses, if applicable, can attend the mentoring dinner on Nov. 9 from 6-8:15 p.m. in the Hinckley Center assembly hall. Register by Oct. 31 at acet.byu.edu/registration. Dress is professional. Junior-level students can attend their department’s specific activity on Nov. 10 (times and locations vary, check with your department to register). Dress is business casual.

  

Marriott School of Business

• Ben Lewis, a strategy professor at the BYU Marriott School of Business, received the Academy of Management’s William H. Newman Award.The annual award honors single-authored papers based on a recently completed doctoral dissertation. This year, it was presented in Atlanta, Georgia, at an annual conference held by the Academy of Management — a far-reaching association made up of thousands of worldwide business scholars. Lewis was one of four finalists and two recipients, claiming the win for the Social Issues in Management division. Lewis’s paper, “The Paradox of Recognizing Responsibility: Social Ratings, Philanthropy, and the Market for Virtue” discusses rating systems used to incentivize companies to meet a certain standard of generosity. These ratings are meant to influence investors, who will ideally opt to support companies with better rankings.In his research, however, Lewis discovered a paradox. When a specified standard is set to qualify a company as philanthropic — say, giving 1.5 percent of its profits to charity— this deters companies from giving even more than they otherwise might have, since they can attain the same reputation at a “lower cost.”Lewis began working on his dissertation nearly five years ago while completing his Ph.D. program at Cornell. Before receiving his doctoral degree, Lewis graduated from BYU in 2008 with a master’s degree in accounting. He returned to BYU as an assistant professor in 2013.

  

College of Life Sciences

• In new research published in Nature Scientific Reports, BYU professor of microbiology and molecular biology Laura Bridgewater found when female mice were exposed to stress, the micro-organisms vital to digestive and metabolic health changed to look like the mice had been eating a high-fat diet.Bridgewater and her collaborators at Shanghai Jiao Tong University took a group of 8-week-old mice and exposed half of the males and half of the females to a high-fat diet. After 16 weeks, all of the mice were exposed to mild stress over the course of 18 days. It was only in female mice, however, that stress caused their micro-organisms to shift as if they were on a high-fat diet.Researchers believe this study could have significant implications for humans.

  

College of Fine Arts and Communications

• The School of Music recently welcomed new opera director Joshua Lindsey. Lindsey obtained a Bachelor of Music from Utah State University and a Master of Music from the Manhattan School of Music. He taught as an adjunct professor while singing at regional opera houses before receiving his Ph.D. in music from Indiana University.After continuing to sing throughout the US, Lindsey and his wife, Molly, moved to Europe for more career opportunities. Lindsey eventually got a job in Austria and they remained in Europe for seven years as he sang in over 500 performances.His directorial debut will be “A Grand Night of Opera,” on Oct. 21, 24 and 25-28.